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BIG PHYSICS, BIG QUESTIONS –

A dig or two at the past

By Paul Bahn

THE geography of Egypt did not permit the development of urbanism, as the Nile valley was too narrow for the agricultural hinterland to support cities. So one of the great question marks that has always hung over ancient Egypt is how and when its transition to a state occurred. The solution is difficult to pin down, since we have so little settlement evidence for the pre-dynastic period of more than 5000 years ago. The vast majority of data come from burials.

So Kathryn Bard set out to analyse these burials with modern methods in From Farmers to Pharaohs (Sheffield Academic Press, pp 144 £27/&dollar;37.50). She chose to focus on two cemeteries&colon; Armant, 9 kilometres south of Luxor with only 250 graves but the best studied of predynastic Egypt. Her second choice was Nagada, 28 kilometres to the northwest of Luxor. With more than 2200 graves, however, it is by far the biggest known cemetery from predynastic Egypt.

She is refreshingly frank about the inherent uncertainties in these sets of data. In part of Armant, for example, only 13 per cent of the graves were undisturbed. Most are dated only by relative periods of time through their pottery typology. Less than half of the skeletons have had their age and sex determined. And we can have no idea of how representative a sample of the population these cemeteries contain&colon; the 250 Armant burials span 800 to 1000 years, so some members of the community must have been buried elsewhere.

Undaunted, Bard first tackles the Armant data. Her cluster analyses of the tomb contents reveal no clear appearance of social stratification; there is merely an increase in grave size through time. As for the far greater Nagada sample, even this fails to produce a clear picture. In fact, it shows a rise in rich graves in the middle period (about 3600 to 3300 BC), followed by a drop. This is interpreted as a rise in social complexity (with more diverse and more abundant grave goods and materials), laying the foundations for the emergence of the early state; the subsequent decline is seen as a possible shift of the power base to some other area.

Throughout this admirably honest and modest study, Bard takes pains to point out the shortcomings of her evidence and the tentative nature of her conclusions. Against all the odds she has produced a useful analysis of a problem that epitomises David Clarke’s famous definition of archaeology as “the recovery of unobservable behaviour patterns from indirect traces in bad samples'” …